What

Symphony is a NYC-based markets’ infrastructure and technology platform that connects financial markets workflows. Symphony’s suite of products includes: StreetLinx, which connects buyside clients to sellside dealers; Cloud9, a voice platform for high-touch communication; and Amenity Analytics, an NLP-driven analytics platform for investment decisions.

Founded in 2014, Symphony has more than half a million users representing over 1,000 institutions, including the top ten largest investment banks worldwide by revenue. As of its $165M Series E round in 2019, Symphony is a unicorn, and has received venture funding from investors such as Standard Chartered Bank, MUFG Innovation Partners, and Bpifrance.

Why

According to Brad Levy, CEO of Symphony, current technological conditions are what allow solutions like Symphony’s to succeed. Much of the tech has existed for some time, Levy said, such as solutions working on “big data.”

“Symphony is part of the elements coming together to make this stuff much more accessible, much more real, and much more impactful,” he said.

This confluence—which allows Symphony’s suite of products to function interoperably—also lowers the barriers to entry for smaller players. Large firms have leveraged AI and machine learning for a long time, Levy said, but the push to remote work at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing tech changes have helped create a “reasonable cost to access.”

How

Symphony operates as the platform for clients’ data, but does not furnish that data itself.

“Because we encrypt so heavily and we see so little, it's hard for us to utilize the data directly and serve up an answer to our client,” Levy said. “As much as have a sense of what's on our network so we could build tools and workflows that would give someone the ability to do things if they had access to the data.”

As a result, Levy anticipates—and encourages—operational changes to how companies store and manage data. “The industry tends to take an approach of storing what you only need to store for compliance from a data perspective,” he said. “I think that will shift in the next several years.”

Levy thinks that more data will get stored in compliance with local regulatory frameworks—striking a balance between accidentally deleting valuable data and storing redundant information.

At the same time, Levy suspects that more categories of data will become available for use in the coming years.

“I would argue that there's more liquidity on the phone in the world than any electronic trading platform, period,” Levy argued. “Because a lot of markets have to exist where you can do this type of flow in this type of volatility environment.”

Cloud9 and, in general, advances in transcription quality will help firms collect information from their phone calls and generate actionable records and insights from that activity.

“If data is the source of energy, then AI is the electricity,” Levy concluded.